Our Hospitality (1923)

Buster Keaton is a victim of the villain's hospitality

Directed by John G. Blystone and Buster Keaton

Starring Buster Keaton, Joe Roberts, and Natalie Talmadge 

Produced by Joseph M. Schenk Productions

As if life was not hard enough in Appalachia, a generations-long feud between the McKays and Canfields ensures that members of those families will come to an early end.  Such is the lot of John McKay when James Canfield pays him a visit.  The two lock eyes in a downpour, fire their weapons and add two more casualties to the conflict.

James Canfield's brother Joseph has stayed away from the violence, but, seeing his brother gunned down, the man vows to raise his sons to avenge the Canfield name.  For her part, John McKay's widow sends their son Willie away to stay with an aunt in New York.  He is raised mercifully unaware of the blood feud between the families.

Twenty years go by and the time comes for Willie to claim his family's homestead in Appalachia.  He learns of the bloody history of his family name and leaves on an eventful train ride (with his dog following along) that finds him seated next to Joseph Canfield's daughter.  They don't know each other so they pass the time amicably dealing with the bumps and detours that an early train ride might bring.

Upon arriving at his birthplace, Willie encounters one of Canfield's sons, who recognizes Willie as his sworn enemy.  Canfield is unarmed however and can't find a weapon to borrow before McKay heads off to find his estate.

McKay's dreams of inheriting a mansion are blown to pieces when he finds the rundown shack his family called home.  He finds Canfield's daughter outside her home and she, still unaware of their family ties, invites the man to dinner.  Willie arrives for supper, but the elder Canfield and his two sons cannot kill him in their house as it would violate their rules of hospitality.

Willie overhears this and realizes that to leave the home is a death sentence.  So, he contrives ways to stay in the house and attempts to sneak out at various points.

Will Willie ever get out of the house and can he do it alive?  And what of the blossoming young love between McKay and Canfield?  Will it end better than Romeo and Juliet?

Our Hospitality is the answer to one of my complaints about many of these early comedies: stakes, or the lack of them.  With the exception of Charlie Chaplin's The Kid, none of the films I have seen have set up a world in which you feel like harm could come to our lead character.  Even as Harold Lloyd is scaling an 8-story building in Safety Last!, he's winking at the camera and you know it will all turn out okay.

Here, the stakes and the danger are real.  There is no humor in the opening melodrama that sees Willie's father killed.  You believe that these are families capable of killing you over your last name.  That opening is important to the rest of the film.

The next scene is an extended sequence on the train ride to his house and the scenes are humorous.  I smiled as a hillbilly threw rocks at the train and the engineer responded with a volley of firewood (which is apparently how the hillbilly gets his firewood).  I also liked how the train got around the donkey that had stopped in its path.  That said, Our Hospitality is really about Willie dealing with this feud and the train is an unnecessary diversion from that.

When the train finally arrives at its destination, the stakes go way up.  One of Canfield's sons offers to show the young McKay around, but he keeps stopping in shops to ask to borrow a gun.  Willie is unaware and the situation is both comical and full of danger.

There are some great set pieces of McKay eluding the Canfields, including a magically appearing waterfall that conceals our hero, but the movie really hits its stride once Willie arrives at the Canfield home.  As they are seated for the meal, a waiter drops a tray and McKay leaps to his feet mistaking the bang for a gunshot.  During the prayer before eating, Willie looks up to find all three Canfield men have one eye open and locked on him.

Fortunately for McKay, a sudden rainstorm (recalling how his father was killed) prevents the guests from leaving.  Willie takes the opportunity to settle into the Canfield's home as a semi-permanent guest.  At one point, when he needs to leave the home to retrieve something, he casually takes the gun from the Canfield son who is guarding him and fires it into the ground.  The time it takes to reload gives him the seconds he needs to exit.

Of course, ultimately our hero has to leave the safety of the house and we are treated to a fantastic chase sequence that is visually very imaginative.  There's a great tracking shot following McKay and his pursuers that may be a first for me during the marathon.

Then there is the climax.  McKay has escaped his enemies by improvised boat, but finds himself floating through some rapids toward a waterfall.  A rope that he had tied around his belly earlier becomes tied to a log which leads to him dangling precariously over the waterfall.  Meanwhile, Canfield's daughter ends up in the water herself trying to save him.  And she's now heading for the waterfall.  The stunt at the end blew my mind.

There's a lot to love here.  They sell the idea that in this place the Canfields could gun down Willie in the middle of the street with no repercussions.  I love the visual image of Willie's dream home literally exploding when he finds the estate he inherited.  There are some great sight gags (is that a woman or a horse?) and comedy beats that are perfectly timed.

Still, I don't think the film is completely successful at balancing the danger of McKay's situation with the comedy.  The jokes work best when they relieve the tension of a situation.  There are moments of slapstick for the sake of slapstick that feel out of place.

As far as the acting, Keaton is superb here.  His previous roles have not called on him to do much, but you can feel his fear and trepidation at every turn in Our Hospitality.  In addition, Joe Roberts is great and menacing as the Canfield patriarch and the rest of the film is populated with some great character actors.

Keaton's latest is my favorite of his to date.  As I said, it doesn't always manage its tone well and I could have lost some of the opening train sequence and not missed it.  This one was definitely worth my time and would be worth yours too.

****1/2 out of *****

NOTES: Keaton was apparently a big fan of trains.  Word has it he set the bulk of the movie in 1930 so he could build a replica of Stephenson's Rocket, one of the first steam trains.

The baby in the prologue was Keaton's actual son, Buster Keaton, Jr.  Natalie Talmadge is Keaton's real life wife and Joe Keaton (Buster's father) played one of the train engineers. Gotta love nepotism!

Joe Roberts suffered a stroke during production and died shortly after filming.  He played the bad guy in most of Keaton's films to that point. 

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Merry-Go-Round (1923)

Directed by Erich von Stroheim Rupert Julian
Starring Norman Kerry, Mary Philbin and Dale Fuller
Produced by Universal Pictures


A count in pre-WWI Vienna enjoys the easy life.  He has servants that awaken him (though he is as eager to get out of bed as a teenager on the first day of school). He has his bath drawn and his meals brought to him.  He has a carefree attitude that allows him to joke around with his staff.  Everything is going well...

...except he is getting married and isn't thrilled about it.  He's not against the idea; he'd just like to put it off.  Unfortunately, the Emperor decrees that the union will happen and happen soon and the count has to go with it.

That doesn't stop him from enjoying life.  One night he goes out with his friends to a carnival where he impresses with his marksmanship in a rifle game, but he soon catches the eye a lowly (but beautiful) organ grinder.  It's her job to keep the music playing as the merry-go-round spins.  He strikes up a conversation with her and the mutual attraction is obvious. He lies to her about his background and claims to be a necktie salesman.  Their flirting is soon interrupted by Huber, the tyrant who runs the carnival and wants to see the organ grinder grind.

The pair see each other socially and the count meets the girl's father, a kind man who distrusts the aristocracy.  The count tries to get out of his upcoming nuptials, but once the emperor makes a decree, it's hard to get out of it.

The girl has her own problems.  Huber has designs on her and when she rebuffs him, she is beaten by the villain.  This is interrupted by her father who stabs Huber in the shoulder.  Unfortunately, the police only see the father's transgression and not Huber's so off to jail with the innocent man!

Who will the count marry?  What will become of the organ grinder and her father?  And how do World War I, a flower pot and an orangutan come into play?

So, the movie begins and I am completely captivated.  The count is a great character.  He's aristocratic, but you can see that while he enjoys the trappings of his social status, he's not taking them too seriously.  He likes his job as one of the emperor's confidantes, but he can take or leave the life he has.  He's geting married because... well, that's what counts do, right?

So when he meets the organ grinder, you can feel the attraction.  Their initial flirtation is well-played and the "meet cute" gets you invested in the outcome.  They also have set up the perfect obstacles to their relationship: the crushing expectations of the count's aristocratic life and the maniacal overlord of the carnival who wants to keep the girl for himself.

So how does such an awesome set up go so spectacularly off the rails?

First, the count becomes melancholy about his predicament which strips all of the life out of what was a very interesting character.  He spends the entire movie looking sad or ashamed about his every action.  Where the count in the first third commanded the screen, he shrunk into the background for most of the rest.

Beyond that, the movie begins to take find its drama not in the character's central conflict, but in a parade of escalating melodramatic incidents, each one more ridiculous then the first.  SPOILERS AHEAD!  After the father is released from prison, he and his daughter go to work for a rival carnival.  Huber crashes the carnival and drops a flower pot onto the father from a couple of stories up.  The orangutan that performs in the rival carnival is so incensed by this that it sneaks out of its cage, climbs through Huber's window, kills him and sneaks back into his cage.  Huber's death is never referenced again.

The silliness of the story wastes some fantastic production design and camera work.  The carnival sets are spectacular and give the viewer a great sense of place.  And the count's world is appropriately lavish.  There are also individual scenes in here that are so well shot that I couldn't believe the detail I was seeing on the screen.  Gorgeous.

Seriously, this dude keeps showing up for no reason.

I should note there is this bizarre framing device of a merry-go-round circling what looks to be the devil.  The demon seems very pleased with the spinning merry-go-round.  It's one of those touches that screams to the audience to take the movie more seriously than is deserved.  


Merry-Go-Round would be better titled as Roller Coaster. It takes you up to see how great it could have been, but, just as you get a glimpse, it hurtles to the ground.  I liked the first third which made the bitterness of the rest that much harder to take.

**1/2 out of *****

NOTE: The film was primarily directed by Erich von Stroheim, who is one of the most important directors of the next twenty years (though I have not seen his work yet).  Von Stroheim was fired toward the end of production and replaced by Julian.  I haven't a great sense of how much of what's on screen is von Stroheim versus Julian.

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Haldane of the Secret Service (1923)

Harry Houdini's one and only facial expression

Directed by Harry Houdini
Starring Harry Houdini, Gladys Leslie, William Humphrey
Produced by Houdini Picture Corporation

Okay, this is where I write my synopsis of what happened in this movie.  Only, I have no idea what happened in this movie.

There are counterfeiters.  There is at least one murder.  There's a passing reference to drugs.  There's a stolen piece of art that the Chinese care about.

Houdini plays an agent of some sort, but that's never spelled out very clearly.  He is the son of another slain agent, so he sort of wants vengeance.  He runs all over the world to track the mysterious Dr. Yu and his vaguely criminal ring.  We never really see them doing anything bad, but Houdini doesn't like them and that should be good enough.

There is also a love interest.  She's one of the bad guys.  Except that she's not.  But she goes with the bad guys to England and France in order to... Ow, my head hurts.

So narratively, this is a mess.  What else?

Title cards.  This movie has more dialogue than any movie I have seen.  I would guess out of 84 minutes of film, 30 are spent reading.  Most of the dialogue is pointless.  We get the mood and interaction from the actors.  We do not need it spelled out.

There are flashbacks.  Houdini asks someone what happened and they recount the tale as we see it on screen.  Repeatedly.  I'm never sure if we are supposed to believe the retelling we are being shown.  Unreliable narrators can be a fun plot device (see Usual Suspects).  Here, the fact that any given narrator may be a liar never even occurs to the Houdini.

As for Houdini the actor, all I can say is he is a great magician.  He has one emotion through the entire film.  I would hate to attempt to characterize what that emotion is because I'm not sure anyone involved with the production knows.

The only good image of the film is a moment where the captured Haldane is strapped to a water wheel that begins churning.  The image of a man rotating around amidst the torrent of water is striking.  It's also a great metaphor for the film: the torture seems purposeless as he is not actually going underwater and the whole wheel soon falls apart, like the plot of this movie.

In the end, our hero is not even around for the climax and reveal of who the bad guy is.  I was genuinely surprised about the identity of Dr. Yu, though I can't decide whether that shock comes from the screenplay or my own complete disinterest in anything the movie offered during the previous 80 minutes.  Haldane does end up with the girl who is possibly already married to two different people and in league with an international cartel, but hey: details, right?

Haldane of the Secret Service is a terrible movie.  It's the world's most ineffective agent against the world's most incompetent criminal conspiracy.  In his last film role, Houdini proves he has one last trick up his sleeve: the ability to make an hour-and-a-half of my life disappear.

1/2 out of ***** stars

NOTE: The Kino DVD contained some archival footage of Houdini doing some escapes as well as part of a film in which he survives a plane crash.  Those are all far more interesting than this movie.  There is also a 1910 Houdini-inspired film Slippery Jim which is incredible in its inventiveness.

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Safety Last! (1923)

Really, was there another image I should have used?

Directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor
Starring Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis and Bill Strother
Produced by Hal Roach Studios

"The Boy" is ready to make the leap to the big city.  Get a good job, make some money, bring his girl into town and marry her.  Sounds like a plan.  In fact "The Girl" likes this plan so much, she is positive "The Boy" will succeed.  The Boy of course starts feeling the pressure.

He hops a train (after accidentally carrying off a baby instead of his suitcase) and finds himself working the fabric counter at a department store.  The pay is not great.  He can't pay his rent, let alone make good on his promise to the girl back home.  So, he pawns his phonograph (much to the chagrin of his roommate) and buys some jewelry to send back home.

Of course, this only convinces the girl that she should head to the city to visit her successful boyfriend.  Faced with the choice between coming clean and developing a hair-brained scheme... well, we all know which option has the comedy gold.  The boy tries to convince the girl he has an incredibly important job at the store and begins bossing some very confused employees around.  He's exhausted from attempting to keep up the charade, but then he overhears his boss say he'll give a cool grand to someone who comes up with a plan that attracts people to the store.  The boy accepts the challenge because...

Earlier in the tale, the boy's roommate escaped from the police by scaling the walls of a building.  The boy figures he can just get his friend to replicate the stunt on the walls of the 12-story building his store is in, but this time with advertising.  Hundreds of people show up for the event.  Unfortunately, so does the cop who was chasing the roommate at the beginning of the tale.  The roommate can't get anywhere near the building or he'll be pinched.

The boy swallows hard and decides to climb the building himself.  And up he goes.  His friend is set to relieve him in the middle of the climb, but there are complications.  Will the boy survive the stunt?  Will he get the girl?

Safety Last! is considered the Harold Lloyd masterpiece.  While Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton were carving their niches in the pantheon, Lloyd was working on a different level best described as "holy $%!&, did he really just do that!" cinema.  And staging the last third of your movie as a free climb up a 12 story building certainly falls into that category of movies.

The actual sequence in which Lloyd scales the building is thrilling.  I've seen the iconic image of him hanging from the clock hundreds of times, but when the moment comes there is a real sense of danger.  The movie is incredibly inventive in throwing up obstacles to Lloyd as he climbs and I won't spoil them here.  The camera placement throughout is perfect as we see Lloyd up close, but we also get long shots of him actually scaling a building.

The only issue I have with the sequence is... well, it's not very comedic.  That's not a problem per se, but when a film is advertised as a comedy and comes across as more amusingly thrilling then funny, it's worth warning people what they are getting into.

The rest of the movie is charitably hit or miss.  I loved the comic timing of Lloyd attempting to board the train at the outset.  The visual gag of how he and the roommate hide from the rent-seeking landlady is laugh-out-loud funny.  And some of the moments in the department store are at least worth a smile.  The camerawork and editing throughout are all top-shelf with some interesting dolly shots and a really great use of close-ups, medium and long shots.

However, there are also a lot of jokes that go on way too long.  The sequence where the fabric counter is invaded by bargain-seeking women could have been cut in half.  The moments where the boy is trying to convince the girl that he's a bigwig are just painful.

There's one moment in the film halfway through that took me completely out of the movie.  The boy has brought the girl to his boss' currently empty office and pretends it is his own.  He hears the boss coming so he has his girl sit down in the boss' chair, close her eyes and open her mouth.  When the boss enters, he explains to the boss that the girl fainted and he should run to get water.  But the girl hadn't actually fainted!  She could hear every word he said!  Why didn't she question him on this point?  It was like when he said close your eyes, she went into an actual coma.  Bizarre.

Still, my problems come in moments, in drips and drabs.  The whole of Safety Last! is justifiably a classic for its amazing final third. The movie's sole purpose is to propel Lloyd onto that building and give film lovers one of the most iconic sequences of any era.  Mission accomplished.

****1/2 out of *****
Photo from The Droid You're Looking For

Check it!  Full version of the movie embedded below!

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The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)

Directed by Wallace Worsley
Starring Lon Chaney, Patsy Ruth Miller and Norman Kerry
Produced by Universal Pictures

Paris during the late 1400s.  The city enjoys an uneasy peace between the elite and the lower classes.  The King of France sits over the upper crust while Clopin is the self-proclaimed "king of the beggars."  The poor throw their festivals in the plaza outside the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the king's guards ensure things don't get out of hand.

One of the king's guards, Phoebus, becomes smitten with Clopin's adopted daughter Esmeralda.  That's not unusual because most of the males in the story are taken with the girl as well.  Unfortunately, this includes the evil Jehan, brother of the archdeacon.  Jehan convinces Quasimodo, the deformed bellringer of the cathedral, to kidnap Esmeralda.  Unfortunately for the hunchback, he is captured by Phoebus during the attempt and publicly flogged.  Only Esmeralda takes pity on him, bringing him a drink of water.

Jehan and Clopin learn Phoebus and Esmeralda plan to marry and conspire to upset the union.  Under the threat of a real class war, Esmeralda reluctantly agrees to forsake Phoebus' love, but plans on last rendezvous at the cathedral.  During their secret meeting, Jehan stabs Phoebus and Esmeralda is blamed and arrested.  Under the pain of torture, she even confesses to the crime.

As Esmeralda is being led to the gallows, she is forced to stop and repent on the steps of Notre Dame.  Quasimodo sees the woman who showed him kindness and swings down to her rescue.  The archdeacon provides her sanctuary within the cathedral, but Clopin plans an assault on the church to take back his daughter.

Will Phoebus and Esmeralda's love win out?  And what will become of our title character?

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is not really about the hunchback of Notre Dame.  It's actually everyone else's story.  It's a love story between a young man and woman.  It's a political struggle between an evil underclass leader and an evil psuedo-representative of the church.  The title character is on the periphery, more a pawn of others than an active agent himself.

Then why is Quasimodo important?  He's the x-factor. He Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film.  He's Sloth in The Goonies (there's even a physical resemblance).  He the variable that none of the conspirators can plan for, but he finds himself at the center of everything.  And you cannot predict which side he'll come down on.

Lon Chaney plays Quasimodo as though the scenery was an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Of course, the make-up is great.  A tuft of hair, awful teeth, one misshapen eye, that hunched back... it looks fantastic.  He's jumping around like a monkey, yelling and screaming at his enemies and joyfully riding up and down on the rope that rings the bells.  From scene to scene, he is either the most animal-like or most human member of the cast.

Unfortunately, the movie itself is kind of blah.

Sometimes a movie is overly complex; this one is needlessly complex.  There are side characters and subplots that go nowhere.  Esmeralda's birth mom (from whom the beggars abducted the girl as a child) is now a crazy old woman who wishes death upon all the gypsies, especially Esmeralda (not realizing the girl is actually her daughter).  Then at the end, she realizes Esmeralda is her long lost child and... nothing.  Esmeralda doesn't find out.  They never meet after the woman makes the discovery.  It's a plot thread that just dangles.

The sets here are lavish, but there really isn't much of a world built.  None of the spaces feel at all connected and some scenes play like they are from a different movie entirely.  Nothing feels terribly lived in or real.  Some characters (the king, the poet) exist only to say a line or two because they needed someone to say that line.  They are not really a part of the goings on; they just appear to conveniently move a plot point along and then disappear into the ether.

The few action moments in the movie are really poorly realized.  You cannot make out the leads from the extras and it becomes hard to follow.  Who is winning or losing?  No idea.

I'm also going to assume that surviving versions of the film have suffered some unkind edits.  At one point, Clopin is injured and seemingly dying on the steps of the cathedral.  We never go back to it.  I'm assuming he died?

After Quasimodo is wounded at the end saving Esmeralda, she looks on very concerned.  That is, she looks concerned until Phoebus shows up.  Then she looks relieved and leaves with him, not giving a second thought to her mortally wounded hero.  Really?  No resolution between the hunchback and the damsel in distress he rescued?

There's a lot of great stuff in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, principally Chaney's lead performance and the spectacular sets.  However, the movie itself feels sloppy.  The lead performance deserved better.

**1/2 out of *****
Photo from Film School Rejects

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The Ten Commandments (1923)

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
Starring Theodore Roberts, Charles de Rochefort, Estelle Taylor
Produced by Paramount Pictures

In the deserts of Egypt, taskmasters force slaves to carry a statue of the Sphinx to a new resting place.  Never mind that the Hebrews are tired and thirsty.  If one of them is run over in the process, so be it.  It is all to honor the Pharoah and his Egyptian deities.  Who will save the people?

Moses, of course.  With Aaron by his side, he has already unleashed nine plagues upon the people of Egypt, but now he is delivering his worst threat: the death of the first born sons of the country.  The Pharoah laughs the threat off and calls in the dancing girls.  That is a decision the leader soon regrets.

As Egypt wails from the slaughter of its children, the Pharoah discovers the death of his own boy.  Grief-stricken and scared, he releases the Hebrews from their bondage and Moses leads them into the desert.  The Egyptian leader quickly changes his mind and pursues the nomads in chariots.  They come to the Red Sea.  Things get biblical.  There is a parting, some stone tablets and a golden calf...

...All of which, we discover, are being read from the Bible by a woman in the 1920s to her two children Danny and John.  Both love their mother, but Danny is convinced that the ten commandments are outdated.  He meets and marries a fellow heathen girl and sets out to break the commandments.  After three years, Dan is a successful contractor, while John is still a lowly carpenter.  Dan decides to cut corners building a new church in town by skimping on the cement to sand ratio.  Will Dan's attempt to break the commandments be fruitful?  Do you really have to read the rest of this review to know the answer?

Let's start with the good.  In the Egyptian prologue story, the effects are spectacular.  The parting of the Red Sea looks superb, with some great visual trickery showing the Israelites crossing between the walls of water.  The sets, exteriors and costumes all evoke a great sense of time and place.

Still, the prologue has story problems.  We get one sequence of the "evil" Egyptians, are quickly told that there have been nine plagues and next thing you know the first born are getting whacked.  I already know the story and the movie is relying on that.  If it weren't, Moses isn't much better than Pharoah in terms of his arc.

After the Israelites have escaped and are camped on the bottom of Mt. Sinai, the effects work kicks in again.  The delivery of the word of god involves some impressive explosions and a bolt of lightning to actually carve the tablets from the stone.  The spectacle of it is better than the story though.

Once we go to the modern tale, the movie almost becomes a comedy.  Here we have Dan who decides to break all of the commandments.  And for the rest of the movie, he is obsessed with this.  He's constantly bringing it up.  It just never feels like an authentic reaction.  You also have to question the wisdom of a woman who marries a guy with adultery and murder on his to-do list.

After Dan's life goes to hell (oh, spoiler: the guy who decided to disobey God has things go to hell in his life), the true subtlety of screenplay kicks into full gear.  Dan attempts to escape the authorities in his motorboat named "Defiance."  When the engine stalls, Dan and the boat are dashed against a cliff.  But not before Dan looks up and sees the cliff transform into the two stone tablets with the ten commandments.  The message hits you with the subtlety of an anvil falling from ten stories up.

There is a lot more about the "modern" story that is ponderous and ludicrous, but it is not really worth going into.  As a screen test for DeMille's remake with Charles Heston, this is four stars.  As something for the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000, four-and-a-half.  On its own, it's sadly:

*1/2

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1923: Welcome to Hollywood... land

We finally leave behind 1922 and move onto 1923.  So what's happening? Time magazine is published for the first time in March, Yankee Stadium opens its gates in April and President Warren G. Harding dies in office in August.  Most important for me though?  The premiere of Hockey Night in Canada as a radio show.  I'm a Flyers fan, but I have a great respect for the history of the sport and it is amazing that the flagship program has been around for so long.

In 1923, the famous Hollywoodland sign was erected to advertise a housing development.  In movies, the Fleischer brothers produce the first feature length animated film, a documentary about Albert Einstein.  In a strange bit of serendipity, Cecil B. DeMille releases his original version of The Ten Commandments the same year that Charles Heston is born.  Heston would star in DeMille's remake of the movie 34 years later.  A new technology for recording sound on the edge of film strips debuted in New York.  This method would become the industry standard.

What are we watching?  The Ten Commandments has already arrived from Netflix so that is a given.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney is a definite.  I also absolutely have to see Safety Last! which is considered by some to be the definitive Harold Lloyd film.

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